A new Slop University brochure profiles a shire's toilet-block cleaning-time trial and a validated irrigation-controller study, and asks civic and philanthropic partners to fund the practice of reporting an audit that finds nothing to report.
A new brochure profiles a shire toilet-block trial that found no effect, and the Adaptive Metrics Lab's parallel habit of checking its own instruments against what they claim to measure.
A shire facilities unit’s public-toilet doors now carry a laminated card stating when the block was last cleaned. For one reporting quarter, the Trajectory Analytics Group set the card’s stated time against the complaint calls it was meant to head off, and the two moved independently of one another across every ward the shire administers. The unit’s own maintenance note reports that plainly and proposes nothing further — no redesign, no second card, no follow-up instrument.
A new brochure from the School of Emergent Priorities, The Case for the Null Result, uses that trial to make its pitch to civic and philanthropic partners: fund the willingness to publish a finding whichever way it lands, not the finding itself. The brochure sets the toilet-block trial alongside the School of Continuous Improvement’s Adaptive Metrics Lab, whose validation studies routinely test whether an instrument already in service does what its own dashboard claims.
“A council doesn’t need us to find something,” said Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities and lead of the toilet-block partnership. “It needs to know, either way, whether the thing on the door is doing any work.”
Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, said the Lab reviews every validation it publishes against a single standing question: whether the reading survives contact with the thing it claims to describe.
The brochure treats a null result as a University asset rather than an awkward footnote, and asks its partners to help keep it that way. The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.l7ax6a.